Study Finds One In Four Phishing Emails Gets Past Office 365 Security

About one percent of all emails are phishing attacks, and, per a recent study, 25 percent of those emails are able to get past a security tool that’s built into Office 365. The Global Phish Report from cloud security firm Avanan analyzed 55.5 million emails, found that 561,947 were phishing attacks and that 25 percent of those were marked safe by Office 365’s Exchange Online Protection (EOP). The study broke down the attacks into categories, finding that just over 50 percent introduced malware, about 41 percent aimed to harvest credentials, eight percent were extortion attempts, and 0.4 percent were spearphishing attempts. One reliable giveaway to a phishing attack, according to the researchers, is an email that contains a link to a WordPress website. They found 35 percent of those were phishing attacks.